The Science Of Luck

Before carving her way downhill on her snowboard, Eva Samková whips out a makeup pencil and draws a thin, twirled, mustaché. Why? — because she’s won a medal every time she’s competed with a ‘staché. Is it lucky? Maybe.

Lucky charms aren’t just for pro athletes — they’re a weird evolutionary trait that all of us have adopted, in some way.

Lucky, Lucky, Lucky

This is a pattern.

This is a pattern.

And this is a pattern.

But is this a pattern?

Technically…no. But our primitive lizard brain is so primed to look for patterns that…anything can become a pattern. It’s the reason why your friend wears a specific pair of underwear before their test, why Wade Boggs ate chicken before every baseball game, and why I have a pair of “meeting boots”. Yep, that’s right. These are my meeting boots:

How Survival Turned Into Superstition

Correlation isn’t always causation but our brain doesn’t know that and doesn’t want to take the chance.

Which is why in countries like Singapore, residential units with “8” in their unit number can be sold for significantly more than flats with a “4” in their unit number because in Chinese numerology, 8 is a lucky number, while 4 is considered a supremely unlucky number.

We have lucky charms for protection, fertility, intelligence, and wealth — all things that are seemingly outside of the human ability to control.

How Do Lucky Charms Work?

The most famous study of the lucky charm phenomenon was performed with 28 participants, who were split into 2 groups and asked to make 10 putts with a golf ball. The group who had been told that the ball they were given was lucky, performed better.

How I see it is that there are two spheres of control within our lives. The things we can control, and the things we can’t. You can control how well you prepare for an interview, but you can’t control the interviewer, or the company.

But here’s the thing — the spheres aren’t equally sized for everyone.

Lucky charms serve to amplify (or buff, for you video game nerds) the positive outcome of the external factors — if you believe in them. An experiment found that people who believed more in external forces of control were more likely to subscribe to notions of luck. Here’s a scenario to illustrate:

But Is Believing In Luck Necessarily A Bad Thing?

Experimental psychologist Richard Wiseman spent 10 years studying the reason why some people feel that they are consistently met with favourable chances (lucky) while others are met with nothing much but misfortunes (unlucky).

In one experiment, Wiseman asked a group to count the number of photographs in a newspaper. One group took 2 minutes while the other took 2 seconds. The latter group had spotted a text message, “Stop counting — there are 43 photographs in this newspaper.” While the others were too busy looking for photographs.

“Unlucky people miss chance opportunities because they are too focused on looking for something else. They go to parties intent on finding their perfect partner and so miss opportunities to make good friends. They look through newspapers determined to find certain types of job advertisements and as a result miss other types of jobs. Lucky people are more relaxed and open, and therefore see what is there rather than just what they are looking for.” — The Luck Factor, Richard Wiseman

In another experiment, Wiseman asked a group to imagine themselves at a bank that suddenly was being robbed. Some believed it was due to sheer bad luck that they were at the bank that day while others believed they were lucky to have even survived because the situation could have been much worse.So perhaps it’s all down to one’s mindset; lucky people tend to use counterfactual thinking — one’s ability to imagine what might have happened, rather than what actually did happen — to look at the silver lining of seemingly bad situations.

Back to Lucky Charms: Should You Start Believing In Them?

For the same reasons that Steph Curry chews his mouthguard when making a free throw, Michael Jordan wore his college basketball shorts under his uniform, and why Eva Samková draws a mustaché on her upper lip, I’ll still keep wearing my lucky meeting boots. But I’m not going to stop preparing for my meetings, either. And I don’t think any of these top athletes slacked off when preparing for their respective sports.

Instead of surrendering to chance and external factors, let’s focus on things we can control. Increasing chance opportunities by pushing yourself out of your comfort zone, listening to your intuition, seeking new opportunities and developing a resilient mindset are some ways you could ‘create’ your own luck.

As Wiseman mentions, “New or even random experiences introduce the potential for new opportunities.“

Now go live your best life! Good Luck!

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